If self-publishing is the new Wild West, who’s the Sheriff?
Does self-publishing need better regulation, or a bit more self-control?
I want to talk about self-publishing. In particular the self-published pornography that found its way on WH Smith’s website via the retailer’s partnership with Kobo, which was spotted by The Mail on Sunday and has since led to a virulent press and social media campaign against ‘vile trade’.
The story has already been extensively covered in the media. What the reporting of this story is dancing around, however, is a serious conversation that e-reading platforms, their retail partners and authors are not having about what it means to be a good actor in this industry. This article, which came to my attention over the weekend, puts its finger neatly on a fundamental problem with self-publishing. In the race to make a fast buck, says author Catherine Ryan Howard, self-publishers are at serious risk of treating readers with contempt.
The process by which ‘incest porn’ could find its way into the children’s section of WH Smith’s eBook store is an excellent example of the bad behaviour that Howard calls out in her article. Here the offending titles were uploaded to Kobo’s self-publishing platform along with inaccurate and misleading metadata that were intended to aid their ‘discovery’ by consumers. The effect was that some decidedly unsavoury bedtime stories ended up being served to shoppers alongside the breakfast porridge in Goldilocks and The Three Bears and an easy outrage story was born.
Kobo has already released a statement saying that this situation arose came about as a result ‘of a select group of publishers and authors violating the self-publishing policies of our platform’. But this is one pretty run-of-the-mill infringement that has had very serious consequences. It led to WH Smith shuttering its website and today Kobo took all of its self-published content offline while it reviews its vetting processes.
For me this episode highlights a fundamental tension within the eBook selling industry which is all about why being a platform is different to being a retailer. The success of platforms like Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing and Kobo’s Writing Life are quality neutral at the point of entry. They exist to scoop up a critical mass of content because they believe consumers want to deal with the platform with the biggest inventory. Under this model the market takes on the role of the bookseller, serving up what might or might not be worth reading to potential readers on the basis of its popularity among existing readers. Publication on a platform is just that: publication. It is not an endorsement.
This couldn’t be more different for traditional booksellers like WH Smith, which have always curated the selection of books they offer. Whether a bookseller stocks a book because they like it or because they believe it will sell, the very act of putting it on their shelves is an endorsement. ‘This book is here,’ it says, ‘because I the retailer believe it deserves to be there.’ The platform publishes, often indiscriminately, the retailer selects and (by inference endorses). Which is why the nastier branches of erotica might be regrettable in the Kindle Store but unforgivable on www.whsmith.co.uk.
It follows that if booksellers do want to make some much-needed money out of the boom in self-publishing they would be wise to do it on different terms to platforms. Recent history is littered with examples of retailers who have attempted to compete with ‘marketplace’ style ecommerce by prioritising inventory over selection and suffered a reputational loss as a result. This month it’s WH Smith and pornography, but last month it was ASDA with its ‘mental patient’ Hallowe’en costume’ and Tesco with its ‘gay best friend’ inflatable doll.
Yet there is a possible answer to this problem, and ironically it comes straight from the lessons learned by eBay, the company that first popularised and democratised ecommerce. eBay’s genius wasn’t that it created a better market platform than its competitors at the time, but that it developed a network where business was linked to reputation and individual users had a vested interest in policing each other’s behaviour. The company’s buyer and seller feedback mechanism played an essential role in proving who were the good and bad actors in its system. Sellers who broke the rules could be identified and if need be suspended or even expelled. There were consequences to breaking the rules, and they were financial.
The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that an eBay-style feedback system would solve some of self-publishing’s most intractable problems. For example, it could: -
- Identify and incentivise ‘good’ behaviour — Authors who receive consistently good feedback could be rewarded with a ‘Top-Rated Seller’ style quality mark and lower platform fees
- Locate and penalise ‘bad’ behaviour — Authors receiving consistently bad feedback could be penalised through measures such as delayed publication, de-listing from search results or higher platform fees. Depending on the sophistication of the platform it might even be possible to link accounts with individual IP addresses, thus reducing the likelihood of ‘bad’ actors deleting their accounts and re-registering
- Provide a filtering method for conventional booksellers selling self-published books — A ‘Top-Rated-Author’ quality mark could provide a way for conventional booksellers to top-slice the self-publishing market for inclusion on their websites. This would enable booksellers to get some of the benefits of selling self-published books while minimising the risks associated with selling low quality, obscene or spam content. The result would be more Hugh Howey’s Wool and rather fewer inflatable gay best friends.
- Eliminate sock-puppets and review trolls — Good and bad behaviour cuts both ways. Giving a reputation score to author and buyer accounts would be one method of reducing the incidence of users leaving malicious reviews on rivals’ books and mellifluous praise on their own
A system of ascribing feedback to individual authors, publishers and readers wouldn’t solve self-publishing’s problems overnight. 15 years into its existence and eBay’s system is still subject to quirks and problems. What it would do, however, is introduce a kind of common-law into a market that (in parts at least) behaves more than a little like the Wild West.I’m not sure whether we need Sheriffs to patrol Deadwood in the State of Self-Publishing just yet, but a little bit of community policing wouldn’t go amiss.
